Grown-ups don’t hide in the kitchen

Maybe I’m nuttier than normal this week, but I have to get this one off my chest. I’m not generally mean and I’m certain that with this post, I’m challenging thirty seven different rules of karma…

Dear Unnamed Person, (who does a very important task for me and whom I see EVERY day in my building),

I am happy you are in my life and I am grateful for the role you play in it. We would be hard-pressed to get by without your evening visits.

But I must tell you, that now, when I hear you getting off the elevator and heading toward my apartment, I hide in my kitchen so I don’t have to see you. It’s like when my mom would hustle my sister and me into my bedroom so the religious people walking down the street wouldn’t know we were home. (Though now, as a grown-up, it seems like it would have just have been easier to have answered the door and said, “No thank you, we’re good on religion.” But the hiding actually was fun.)

Of course, I can’t explain to you that I hide so I don’t have to see you because now that I’m visibly super-sized pregnant, you ask me every single day, “How are you feeling?” And you say it with such a big smile and happy, excited voice and I can even now hear the womanly-kinship as you revel in my pregnancy — but it makes me crazy so please stop. (I bet you are one of those fans who stand at mile 23 of the NY Marathon and yell, as the runners begin the final slog through the hills of Central Park, “You are so close! Almost there!” Rest assured that 3 miles isn’t almost there.) You see, just like those runners who don’t need to be lied to about how much more of a race there is, I don’t need to discuss how I feel every day, because I’m big as a house and very tired, and you and I are essentially strangers.

Maybe tomorrow you can just smile at me and wave from the door, and I’ll do the same in return. Or I may just stay in the kitchen. I can’t be sure.